Commune of Women (31 page)

If that machine topples, it’ll smash Sophia flat, but the three of them just sit here like toadstools. Maybe it’s the stench that’s gotten to them. Heddi feels as if she’d been administered ether.

As soon as a crack opens at the back of the machine, Pearl wedges herself into it like a scabrous old rat darting into a hole. There’s the crackle of glass grinding underfoot and then a long pause.

Heddi glances at Sophia. She’s bent backward at the waist, hugging the machine and Heddi can’t see her face but she hears her breathing coming in the kind of deep, measured breaths that weightlifters use.

Finally, Sophia grunts, “What’d you see, Pearl?”

There’s another long pause and Heddi’s beginning to wonder if Pearl went back there and died. She had a rat do that behind her refrigerator once.

Then there’s the scrape of glass again and Pearl sticks her head out to make her pronouncement. “Nothin,” she intones gravely.

Suddenly, Ondine is up off the floor and dashes over to her. “Pearl,” she whispers urgently, “what do you mean? Sophia can’t hold this thing much longer.”

Pearl shakes her head like a truculent child and steps out from behind the machine. “Ain’t nothin out thar, I tell ya.”

Ondine snatches the dentist’s mirror from Pearl without a word and wedges herself behind the machine.

Sophia gasps out one word: “
Hurry!
”

As if in a trance, Heddi sees Betty struggle out of one of the plastic chairs which clings, momentarily, to her rump. She pushes it off with annoyance. Then, with surprising speed, she moves to Sophia and braces herself against the upper corners of the machine.

Pearl is doing a kind of shuffling dance, like a molting and deranged chicken, craning her head sideways, trying to see into the crack where Ondine has disappeared.

Heddi alone is disengaged. This is a complete descent of libido. She can’t lift a finger.

Ondine’s slender backside comes wiggling out of the crack. She’s holding the mirror in her fist by its thin handle, like a disheveled fairy queen with her wand.

“Pearl’s right!” Her creamy forehead wrinkles in puzzlement. “There’s nothing out there!”

Pearl gives a victorious cackle, as Sophia and Betty heave the machine back against the door. It slams back with a leaden thump and a grinding crunch of shattered glass.

Betty puts an arm around Sophia, who is breathing like a freight train and white with fatigue. She brings the plastic chair for her to sit in. Heddi knows she should offer her the armchair, but she seems to be unable to move.

“Tell us,” Sophia wheezes.

Ondine steps into the center of their ragged circle, still holding the mirror as if ready to bless them or grant a wish. “Pearl’s right. There are no bodies out there.”

They look from one to another, blankly.

“I think the bodies have been dragged away in the night. There’s a trail of blackened blood smeared down the corridor toward the right. I think the smell will get better now. There’s a pool of coagulated blood right outside the door. That must be what we’re still smelling.”

As if that announcement has exhausted her, Ondine sinks to the floor in one graceful, yogic motion.

“How could that happen without us hearing it?” Betty asks, puzzled.

“Maybe we’re all so exhausted, we’re sleeping better than we think,” Ondine says, with a shrug.

A long silence ensues.

“Well,” Sophia says finally, “either the Good Guys are making some inroads at last, or the terrorists are preparing to storm our battlements. And there’s no way to tell which it might be.”

It must be the heat. The bodies produce heat, just like she thought. They have to get rid of the bodies in order to scan the building and find where the living bodies are massed. All that decomposition is throwing their readings off. That must be it.

And that means they’re preparing to do something – finally.

But how will they know who’s a terrorist and who’s a civilian?

Things are about to get dicey.

It’s as if a plug has been pulled and their little group of automatons has ceased to function. Heddi’s got to rally herself before the silence encases them like wet cement. She clears her throat, as if revving up the requisite energy.

“I guess I’ll invite myself to start this morning.

“I’ve been lying awake all night, pondering my life. What it’ll be like, if...
when
...we finally get out of here.

“This event that we’re experiencing is like a huge axe that’s come chopping down, just cutting all the former years of my life off from all the years that will follow. Everything from now on will be
BTA
or
ATA
–
Before the Terrorist Attack
or
After the Terrorist Attack
.

“We talk in depth psychology about transformational events in the psyche – but I never
dreamed
, either literally or metaphorically, that something of this magnitude would happen to me.”

Before this, she’s been trying to keep everything as normal as possible. Hal may be gone – and it’s looking like he’s really gone for good – but she doesn’t have to have every part of her life disrupted. Her lawyer says Hal’ll have to give her alimony once this thing goes to court. In the meantime, there’s plenty in the bank – savings and checking both – to sustain her. And she has the income from her practice. And there’s the trust fund that her father set up years ago, and the investments to divvy up. Financially, she’s fine.

Keeping things going as usual means keeping Antonio to do the yard, and his wife Alma for the housework. It’s too much for Heddi to do herself and she’s not inclined to do those things anyway. It means keeping the house, while Hal moves out. It means keeping the furniture and the art because most of it originally belonged to her parents. In other words, it means keeping everything just as it was, with only Hal missing.

But last night, she got this wild hair. She thought,
What if I changed everything?

What if she sold the house and moved to that retirement community up on the north coast? She’s betting there are lots of women there at loose ends who’d love to start analysis. Maybe do something physical for the first time since she was a girl – abalone diving or sea kayaking.

Or maybe she could go back to Zurich to the Institute and teach.

Or retire, and take up watercolors.

Or write that book she’s been imagining, compiling everything she’s learned in all these years as an analyst.

Sometime in the night, the ideas just started wriggling inside her, like minnows waking to a spring thaw.

Lying here on this cold linoleum with a roll of toilet paper under her neck has done what fifteen years of analysis with Dr. Copeland couldn’t. It’s been a portal into a new life.

And all she has to do is live long enough to get there!

Or...
almost
all she has to do.

And it’s that other thing she has to do that she wants to talk about this morning. She hasn’t been fully honest with them. She’s presented herself as a successful doctor whose main fault is a kind of professional blindness that allowed her life slip through her hands.

That’s all true. But it’s not all.

They’ve all been so forthcoming. They’ve exposed vulnerable parts of themselves in a way that would take years in analysis. That, Heddi supposes, is the gift of this horrible experience, if gift there be.

Last night, as she lay here and reviewed each of their stories, she was just amazed by the integrity they’ve each brought to their lives – the willingness to examine them and endure them and transform them.

And she’ll be honest – it made her ashamed.

“Oh, Heddi!” Ondine protests. “You’re being so harsh with yourself!”

“Yes, ashamed, Ondine. I know you want to leap in and soothe me. Fix it, so that I can see myself in the same kind light you do.

“And maybe in good time, I will. But first, I have to do some disclosing of my own. And that’s what I intend to do this morning, if you’ve all got the time for it.”

Pearl chortles, her back to the candy machine. “Someone call mah stockbroker fer me – tell him I cain’t come rat now fer that meetin.”

“Yes, and cancel my hair appointment, while you’re at it!” Betty chimes in.

“And here I was just going out for pizza,” Ondine adds.

“Alright, all of you! I’ll get you! This’ll be the longest, most boring story yet!”

Heddi comes from a very wealthy family, as she supposes they may have guessed. There was a big house, fancy parties, a stable of horses of Derby caliber, tennis courts, an Olympic-sized pool with a faux-Grecian-temple pool house – the works.

She attended the best girls’ school on the east coast and could speak French before she was twelve and do Latin declensions like a Roman. She learned how to sit like a lady, greet people with aplomb, and set a table with everything from fish knives and sorbet spoons to five different wine and water glasses. She also learned that women of her class never buy clothing that is too tight or made from synthetic materials, to jump a horse, dance the waltz and foxtrot, and boss the servants. Her school groomed her to be cool, classic and superior.

All this, of course, was not to fit the girls out for authentic lives, but to make them marriageable to men of their own – or better still, an even higher – social stratum. The thought that they might have ideas of their own about how to proceed with their lives never penetrated the silk-lined confines of Miss Pryor’s School for Girls. Such notions, in fact, were discouraged when they erupted,
sui generis
, from their heads, like Athena from the head of Zeus. They were considered as freak emissions of working-class mentality; young ladies were not meant for lives of labor but of courtly ease and elegance.

Heddi’s mother was such a product of such an upbringing. Oh, she was beautiful! Elegant! Always so coolly remote in her beige cashmere crewnecks and pearls, her designer slacks and skirts and jackets. She always looked like she’d just stepped out of a beautician’s chair, a designer’s boutique, or a glass box where she was kept against any disturbing influences upon her perfect blonde page-boy or her spotless white linen.

And Heddi’s father was her perfect match, taller than she by a good foot, two years older, wealthy, tanned, handsome and charming. His ebullience was the perfect compliment to her composure. They were the social catch, the couple to have at any party, wedding or funeral, and Heddi was their sole, perfect child. They were considered to be the first family, nonpareil, of their town.

That was the operative myth that Heddi grew up with: they were perfect, beyond reproach. And more than that, they were ultimately desirable, enviable and the subject of endless inept emulations.

“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” her mother used to say when Heddi complained that some town girl had run out and bought a pair of red shoes or a pink belt or a green sweater just like hers. It went without saying that such behavior was gauche and pathetic.

She guesses she was about six when she first became aware of the night terrors, although it’s more than likely that they had begun long before that. In dreams, bad men menaced her. She would flee in terror through dark ruined hallways with tattered wallpaper hanging in shredded curtains, and black, gaping doorways giving onto empty, echoing rooms. Alone and in terror, she would run and run while the bad men pursued her, gaining on her, reaching for her...and then she would wake up, screaming.

Night after night, her nanny – a huge-bosomed black woman named Matilda – would come hustling in her terry cloth robe and fuzzy pink slippers, and hold her to her giant breast, rocking and crooning, until Heddi could sleep again.

Once, her mother took her to a psychiatrist, who recommended tranquilizers. Her mother hustled them out in an elegant huff. The women of their family did not
need
tranquilizers, even if – or especially if – they were not yet women.

After that, the onus fell on Heddi. She was being naughty. She was failing her elite upbringing – to be out of control emotionally was simply
déclassé
.

Heddi has a filmy recollection of those early years. In the evening, she would have her supper in the nursery, be bathed, dressed in her nightie and put to bed. Then, magically, the door would fly open and Mother, looking like a fairytale princess, would swoop in. Maybe she would be in a slim black dinner dress, or a pink lace sheath by Bal-main. Best was when she was on her way to a fancy ball and she would appear in floor-length silk taffeta or chiffon, with glittering jeweled necklaces and her beautiful hair swept up to show off her long, white neck.

God! She was a vision!

Like a dog who knows by the shoes you put on whether he’s going to get a walk or not, Heddi came to know by her clothing what her mother was scheduled to do: dinner in, dinner out, cocktail party, civic event, afternoon or evening wedding, or charity ball. And Heddi, as devoted, hopeful and forlorn as any dog, took her mother’s meager offerings from her jeweled fingers as if they were tidbits of sirloin.

Her mother would bend and kiss her and call her her Little Angel and then, with a silken rustle like the sudden start of birds’ wings, she would depart as quickly as she had come, leaving the room vibrating with her beauty and sighing with her French perfume.

Matilda would stick her head in and say, “Now, you lucky Little Angel, you go to sleep now, you hear?” And she would turn out the light. Heddi would snuggle down in the darkness feeling like the luckiest, most loved little girl in the world.

And a few hours later, she would erupt from sleep, screaming in terror.

Sometimes, after her evening bath, instead of a nightie she would be dressed in a pretty dress and Maryjanes and Matilda would use a curling iron to make sausage curls in her fine blonde hair. Then, she would be hustled downstairs to make an appearance.

In the salon, there would be a crowd of elegant people, sipping from martini glasses and making a subdued murmur. When Heddi arrived, pushed from behind by Matilda’s firm hand, the murmur would suddenly stop. All eyes would turn toward her. Either Mother or Father, whoever was closest, would take her by the elbow and say, “Say ‘good evening’ to the nice people, Heddi,” and Heddi would curtsey to no one in particular and everyone in general and say, “Good evening.”